What If People Lie?

Everytime I speak to a crowd, at least one person wants to know details about how we collected 250,000 surveys about 380 metrics: what people value, want, need and expect.

It’s a fair question.

Sometimes I think the form the question takes tells me more about the person asking the question than they realize. In this case, at the WeWork Labs incubator for startups in New York City, someone asked me how we can tell if survey respondents are telling the truth, which makes me think that the person asking the question isn’t perhaps entirely forthcoming when filling out surveys! :)

The answer of course is in the methodology, the way the questions are posed, the validity checks we use for every response before they are allowed into the data pool, and by maintaining the random strat stat rep of the population with incredible rigor.